Environment and development in coastal regions and in small islands

Extract from 166EX/4 March 2003
(pdf version of the complete document)

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Towards sustainable living in coastal regions and on small islands

Main line of action 1: Enhancing sustainable living in coastal regions and on small islands: mainstreaming integrated approaches and intersectoral cooperation

Equitable and sustainable management of coastal and small-island resources was advanced through furthering the development of “wise practice agreements for the prevention and management of conflicts over coastal resources and values” at a workshop of the Asia-Pacific University Twinning (UNITWIN) network on the subject (November, Thailand). The meeting brought together university and community people from the intersectoral projects in India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa and Thailand at the site of the Surin Islands project on Indigenous People and Parks. A UNITWIN network among five European universities to promote wise coastal practices was established at the University of Cadiz, Spain, in September and a planning workshop involving also the Universities of Bologna (Italy), Riga (Latvia), St Petersburg (Russian Federation) and Aveiro (Portugal) was held in Cervia, Italy, in November, with the strong support of the UNESCO Venice Office. Wise practices, guidelines and principles were furthered through 13 new postings to the trilingual, Internet-based “Wise Coastal Practices for Sustainable Human Development” Forum (www.csiwisepractices.org user name csi, password wise) ranging from contrasting views on a proposed waterfront development project in the United Republic of Tanzania to a synthesis of forum views on small-island carrying capacity.

Information and knowledge sharing were enhanced through the above-mentioned forum, which now connects some 13,000 people with a wide variety of expertise and affiliations in over 100 countries. Moreover, 37 texts on field project and university chair activities, summaries, and assessments, as well as four resulting publications were added to the CSI website, which is receiving an average of 70,000 hits per month. Both the forum and the website are becoming dynamic parts of the coastal and small-island knowledge society. In addition, an ecological assessment of Ulugan Bay (Philippines) was published as CSI Info 12 and widely distributed, while a book on community-based ecotourism and coastal resource management was produced on the basis of lessons learned in the same area. The Banjarsari (Jakarta, Indonesia) green village concept, in particular the waste management programme, received wide national attention, and was also presented at the World Boy Scout Jamboree in Bangkok in December.

An agreement between UNESCO and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy – Directorate General for Development Cooperation was signed in December, in order to enable UNESCO, through its Venice Office, to implement the FIT project “Adriatic Sea Environmental Master Plan (ASEMP) – Croatia Module” within the framework of the Regional Environmental Reconstruction Programme (REReP) promoted by the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe (SEE). This project aims at developing a prototype module for a web-based Master Plan Tool, available on the Internet, for Croatia’s coastal zone, using geographic information and decision support systems (GIS and DSS), certain features of which will be tested as a pilot investment scheme in a specific environmental sector.

Main line of action 2: Advance actions on priority areas of Small Island Developing States and effective contribution to implementing Barbados+5 and other multilateral agreements and action plans

The sustainable development capacity of small islands was strengthened through the continuation of intersectoral field project activities in a dozen eastern Caribbean islands, as well as in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea and Samoa. This is in addition to the increase in local, regional and interregional Small Islands’ Voice activities as reported below under the cross-cutting projects. Knowledge and information sharing was improved through the finalization, publication (CSI Info 13) and distribution of an abridged version in Creole and French of Haiti’s coastal environment and fisheries laws (www.unesco.org/csi/pub/info/haiti.htm), the finalization of a study on the evolution of village-based resource management in Vanuatu between 1993 and 2001, the expansion of the small-islands webline (www.unesco.org/csi/smis/smallislands.htm), and the publication and distribution of the second to fourth (Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis) in a series of ten booklets on “Wise practices for coping with beach erosion” in the eastern Caribbean islands (www.unesco.org/csi/act/cosalc/brochgre.htm). The article “Wise Coastal Practices, ASEAN’s Small Islands Raise Their Voice”, summarizing the essential features of the above-mentioned Asia-Pacific UNITWIN workshop, was published in ASEAN’s Secretarial Press Room.

Small Islands Voice

Project activities were carried out in the start-up countries in the Pacific (Palau and the Cook Islands), Indian Ocean (Seychelles) and Caribbean (Saint Kitts and Nevis). Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the San Andrès Archipelago in the Caribbean joined the project in late 2002. An Internet-based youth forum (user name view, password only) was launched on a trial basis in September 2002 to allow island schoolchildren, between the ages of 13 and 15 years in the three regions, to exchange views and information on issues of concern to them; 55 messages on seven different topics were posted. A second trial Internet-based global forum – for the general public – (user name siv, password global) was launched in October 2002 with over 7,000 recipients; it generated many contributions from around the world. The trials proved sufficiently successful to justify continuation of both forums in 2003. The Small Islands’ Voice interregional workshop was held in Palau (November 2002) bringing together for the first time representatives from government, non-governmental organizations and youth groups in the project countries. The workshop was aimed at promoting direct interaction between island countries in the three regions and advancing specific Small Islands’ Voice activities nationally, regionally and interregionally. These activities and views expressed are starting to generate local follow-up activities with emphasis on Information and Communication Technologies and will enrich the preparations for the 10-year review meeting of the United Nations Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (Barbados+10) to be held in Mauritius in 2004.

Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) in a global society  

The LINKS project promotes local knowledge and world views as tools to shape and attain the Millennium Development Goals of poverty eradication and environmental sustainability. To build awareness on these issues, the project held an event at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg) on “Linking Traditional and Scientific Knowledge for Sustainable Development”, that was co-organized with the indigenous Tebtebba Foundation and the International Council for Science (ICSU). On this occasion, the LINKS brochure was widely distributed and the website launched www.unesco.org/links. To catalyse critical reflection and dialogue, the WSSD also served to launch the UNESCO-ICSU report on “Science, Traditional Knowledge and Sustainable Development”. In addition, a special issue on “Indigenous Knowledge” was published in French and English in the International Social Science Journal (ISSJ, Vol. 173).

LINKS also contributed at the Asian Civil Society Forum (Bangkok, Thailand) on United Nations/NGO Partnerships for Democratic Governance, where particular attention was paid to the theme of cultural diversity and biodiversity. Fieldwork has been launched focusing on women in the impoverished villages of the Song Hong Delta (Viet Nam) in cooperation with the Vietnamese National Centre for the Social and Human Sciences and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France). A first report submitted on indigenous knowledge and the strengthening of resource-based livelihoods in the Volcanoes of Kamchatka World Heritage Site, Russia, provides the basis for further field action involving Even and Koryak communities, the Max Planck Institute (Germany), the Kamchatka Institute for Environment Protection (Russia) and UNDP-GEF. To strengthen local and indigenous knowledge transmission among youth in Pacific Small Island Developing States, work continues on a CD-ROM on traditional knowledge of navigation in the Pacific. As a complement to the CD-ROM, a documentary film on navigation traditions in Satawal (Federated States of Micronesia) is being prepared with CNRS. Similarly, a documentary is being prepared on women’s knowledge associated with Inuit bird skin clothing construction in Arctic Canada.

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